I figured with such an accomplished head start, Apple could flip a music streaming service in no time. They had the people who created the ideal, just do more of that? Not so fast mister, this is Apple we are talking about and nothing at Apple gets released without being perfect.

Cut-to more than a year later

Last week Amazon released 2 free products, Amazon Cloud Player & Amazon Cloud Drive. The basic gist of both is storage online for all your media — in the cloud. Cloud Player is all about audio (at the moment) and Cloud Drive is all about all other files. Confused? Maybe this video will help.

Sounds pretty incredible right? So how does it stack up against all the other cloud based storage systems out there? For files it is pretty good, it is definitely not as easy to use as DropBox, but that may change rapidly as Amazon figures out what they have. The major advantage of DropBox over Cloud Drive is finder integration on both Mac & Win computers. Not having to keep a web browser window open or download some strange “uploader” is a real advantage.

For music, the service is basically unmatched at the time of this writing. Being able to upload mp3s and have them instantly available for playing online or to be downloaded on another computer is wonderful. The Amazon Cloud Player itself is relatively simple in its design. It has a big yellow play button and does a fantastic job at streaming audio files smoothly. The sound quality is the same as you would expect from a desktop application.

But what about all us people who have bought lots of songs from iTunes? We’re out in the cold, right? Amazon Cloud Player uploads and plays those flawlessly too! What?! You heard me. As long as the AAC track isn’t copy protected (ie – not a 128kbps .m4a file you downloaded from iTunes 2 years ago or earlier) it will upload, play, and have all its tags. This is wonderful functionality for all the folks like me who drift from one music service to another. Amazon has smartly not excluded its competitors users.

Unfortunately if you rip your music into FLAC, APE, Apple Lossless, OGG, or any other formats; you are going to have to convert them to MP3 or M4A if you want to listen to them online. If you just want to upload them, they can be uploaded and accessed through Cloud Drive, but Amazon Cloud Player will not recognize them as audio.

Time to give up on Apple?

So is Apple so late to the party that it will be impossible to catch up? Far from it. Apple will release their cloud music service soon and it will be a game changer, of that I have no doubt. For all of us iPhone and iPod users, the service will also be compatible with our devices (Amazon’s Mobile Cloud Player is not yet available for Apple products). But what Amazon’s service does do, is offer a glimpse in to the future of cloud based services. It may not be perfect yet, but it does change how we store and consume media. Best of all this gives Apple a high bar to jump over — competition is never a bad thing.

The song is available now at iTunes. The full album Turtleneck & Chain comes out 5/10 via Universal Republic.

PS – This is NOT safe for blaring on your speakers at work — but it does feature CGI Garfield.

When I first heard True Blue from Dirty Beaches’ Sweet 16 EP, I have to say I was impressed. The romantic tone and undulating guitars made me want to sit by a fire on a beach at dusk, wrapped in a musty blanket with my best-girl, listening to the waves crash. It was just this over-romanticized vision of 1950s sound that got me hooked. As a sound, it was fresh and really got me interested.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTch7g_gkfU]

The Badlands album, however, suffers from too much of a good thing. While an EP of fuzzed out rockabilly guitars is fun, a full albums worth of difficult to decipher eclectic low-fi is a little hard on the ears. Sure there are some interesting moments on Badlands, but after about 4 songs — you get it. You get the whole thing. You think, I hope this changes a little from the predictability of the “dadada-dada-dadada-dada” and it doesn’t. It holds tight — to a fault.

Even wonderful songs like Lord Knows Best begin to grate on your nerves after the repetition of the 5 songs before it. I want to like this album, because I really have been looking forward to it, but as an album it doesn’t hold up. It stubbornly marches to the end without the love or joy you might have expected from the standouts like True Blue or Lord Know Best. By the end, Black Nylon and Hotel gave me distinct impression I was being asked to leave the beach I had so enjoyed hearing snapshots of before.

Rating: 40/100
Released: March 28, 2011

Nero by Little Tybee

Needed a pick-me-up after the events of last week. Really looking forward to their new album out April 5th on Paper Garden Records.

Radiohead surprised everyone today and released their new album The King of Limbs. Fans in the states cheered to have the album a full day early, from scheduled release, to celebrate an unusual warm snap. Spring had come early, complete with it’s own soundtrack. Somehow it felt right.

However not all people were as happy as the fans. Reviewers, surprised by the sudden release, scrambled to have some sort of reviews online. Some snarky reviews even pointed a finger at the band.

“Radiohead’s release schedule is not, you imagine, geared towards helping music critics. Minimal warnings, last-minute changes of plan and confusing announcements posted on Twitter in Japanese – does Thom Yorke not realise we have tight deadlines? The end result is a mad-rush by critics, bloggers and Tweet-freaks to be first to post their opinion on The King of Limbs’ eight tracks. Trouble is, Radiohead don’t make music designed for a hurried listen. A couple more plays down the line and the opinions you read here may be subject to change.” – Radiohead – The King of Limbs: First review

The truth is, while Radiohead may not have shattered every soundscape ever conceived with The King of Limbs they did do one thing which is an innovation in the music industry, not one solitary copy of The King of Limbs was leaked to file-sharing services. Not one review came out ahead of time. This album came out at the same time for everyone – you, me, reviewers, and the thieves. I have never heard of in the past 15 years any major album, by a major band no less, not get ratted out by some unscrupulous reviewer’s copy finding it’s way on the net.

This was a media blackout in the best way possible, and I for one was glad not to have reviewers barking their opinions at me. When did we as music listeners stop making our own decisions about what music we like or dislike by how it effected us upon our first unfettered listen. Why must EVERYTHING we consume need to be put in context by some know-it all who tells us why and how we should appreciate it. Art is about making your own mind up about what you are experiencing and no professional who spent years at journalism school is going to change that.

Today was an amazing day not just because of what I heard, but mostly because of what I didn’t.

Download the MP3

Tracks Played

1. Long Boat Pass by Tennis on Cape Dory (2011)
2. Got To Move by Cake on Showroom of Compassion (2011)
3. True Blue by Dirty Beaches on True Blue B/W Sweet 17 (2010)
4. Too Young To Burn by Sonny & The Sunsets on Tomorrow is Alright (2010)
5. A Coin On The Tongue by Benoit Pioulard on Lasted (2010)

All songs can be found on our January MOG Playlist.

Links!

• NastyCute
  • Porcupine Story
  • Dog with a Cone
• ElizaSkinner.net
• follow @Eliza Skinner on Twitter
• Baby Wants Candy
• Skull-A-Day
• Eliza’s & DC Pierson’s Magic Bag show at Smodcastle started by the wonderfully bearded Kevin Smith

Link of the day

• Googley Eyes Project

Songs

1. Cameras by Matt & Kim (2010)
2. Angela Surf City by The Walkmen on Lisbon (2010)
3. Thank Us Later by Jaill on That’s How We Burn (2010)
4. You Are Not Alone by Mavis Staples on You Are Not Alone (2010)
5. September Gurls by Big Star on #1 Record/Radio City
6. Tightrope (feat. Big Boi) by Janelle Monáe on The ArchAndroid (2010)
7. Right On (Feat. Joanna Newsome, STS) by The Roots on How I Got Over (2010)
8. Excuses by The Morning Benders on Big Echo (2010)

Everybody’s favorite musical noodler is back at it with what can be considered a rocker… for him. Sure it’s whispery and filled with all the over-lavish overlapping lutes you’d expect from Sufjan Stevens, it also is the most direct album Stevens has made in a while. All Delighted People while full of the polite Simon & Garfunkle plucking guitars has a finger pointed out – at you, rather than toward you.

Unfortunately, there is a little too much signature musical and vocal noodling, which leaves the album feeling more like an idea rather than a statement. Nothing exemplifies this more than the unconvincing electronic passages, which sound more like Sufjan expressing his amateurish appreciation of the form, rather than its mastery. While All Delighted People is gorgeously produced, as we have come to expect, it left me feeling that Stevens is dealing with a real identity crisis between being an singer-songwriter and his newfound place as a classical composer. Songs such as “All Delighted People (Classic Rock Version)” promise a focus back on Sufjan’s roots, but the 8 minute track is a meandering composition and neither classic or rock.

While there are beautiful moments to All Delighted People which will make a listen enjoyable, the album follows Sufjan farther down the avante-guard hole he fell into after Illinoise. More strings, more production, less structure.

Rating: 60/100

(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay released January 1968
Recorded Nov 22 & December 8 1967

Today we break from our usual format, and take you behind a song that I hold dear to my heart.

To my mind anything other than the purchased audio accounts for DRM and I don’t want it. While I’m all for legal downloads, I’m not into being tracked, no matter how legal you make it. Lucky for you and me the account information is actually embedded at the last moment of the iTunes purchase and download process. Which means it isn’t hard embedded, it’s only some additional meta-data. I will have to mention, at this point, that this process only works on iTunes Plus (.m4a) files downloaded from the iTunes Music store. It will not work on older iTunes Protected files (.m4p) although protected files can be upgraded in the iTunes music store to iTunes Plus for a nominal fee.

To remove the meta-data, you need an program which doesn’t recognize the additional meta-information and a way to save the audio losslessly. The program that fits the bill is Rogue Amoeba’s amazingly versatile Fission ($32). It’s a lossless audio editor for the mac and it’s a seriously wonderful tool that I use on a daily basis for editing audio files and creating ringtones. To remove the meta-information, open the iTunes Plus file and re-save the audio.

That’s it. It losslessly saves a .m4a with no user information embedded and best of all, it doesn’t recode or transcode the audio (as with some other burn a CD and reimport methods). It is exactly the same quality coming out as it went in.

A few things you might notice about this process is that the file size will drop after saving. Not entirely sure why. Perhaps removing all that extra meta-data cleans house a bit. You will also notice that the bit-rate for the file will go from 256kbps to something else. This is normal and because Apple, in an attempt not to scare it’s users with different  variable bit-rates from the encoding process, makes every file share the 256kbps regardless of it’s true bitrate. Lastly, Fission adds 0:00.032 of audio to the track? While odd, this shouldn’t actually effect the sound, as it’s 0.03% of a second, so unless you have crazy dog ears, you wont hear it.

Best of all, now you have an audio file that has none of your private data attached, which in my books is truly DRM free.